Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is wine fake?

asteriskmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 559 posts

Re: Is wine fake?

#101

Post by 2devnull »

antognini wrote: post #49

One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and every couple of years he would put on an after-hours wine tasting class for a semester. One of the points he made was that there are absolutely wines which are objectively better and worse and that experts can reliably tell them apart. He had met enough experts who could identify a vineyard and vintage blind to know there was something to it. But sitting on…

Wine makers can easily pick out flaws of different sorts. Wine tasters and wine makers do not taste wines in the same way based on my experience. Some flaws, like Bret, can improve the score of wines given by tasters for certain styles, but wine makers generally scoff at such flaws.

Re: Is wine fake?

#102

Post by triceratops »

surement wrote: post #67
kube-system wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above $60, you’re mostly paying for name, provenance, or prestige rather than taste.

Just because you don't know how to appreciate well-made things doesn't mean that they're strictly ostentatious.

"Ostentation - pretentious and vulgar display, especially of wealth and luxury"

To a person who can't tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine, expensive wine is "strictly ostentatious" by definition.

Re: Is wine fake?

#103

Post by ericlewis »

femto wrote: post #78

It's fun to do a "blind tasting party". Get a bunch of friends to each bring a bottle. Maybe give a criteria, like a price range, so people don't feel obliged to impress with the price tag. All bottles are delivered to the kitchen at the beginning of the night, where the host puts each in a numbered paper bag. Each attendee gets a score sheet. Start serving, either by pouring or just putting a few bottles on the tabl…

My family often does this, but more like you have to figure out which wine is which out of 14 across many varieties and provenance. My wife and I both got 2nd and 3rd place with only mixing up two. Though it was less so what is cheap what is expensive, it is an interesting game nonetheless. We blamed the many years we spent in Napa on being so good :P

Re: Is wine fake?

#104

Post by AlbertCory »

I keep teasing this, but my friend Jerry and I have done a whole series of Triangle Tests on various aspects of making coffee. We've finally settled on him publishing a Just The Facts, Ma'am doc, and me publishing the narrative. Real soon now.

Anyhow:

Our philosophy is "It doesn't matter what the experts can taste. What matters is what you can taste."

So for wine, it's easy for you & your friends or relatives to put out three glasses, two the same and one different, and see if the taster can pick out the outlier. If they can't, why should they care which one WineSpectator says is better?

Re: Is wine fake?

#105

Post by IshKebab »

> They look at 6,175 tastings from 17 wine tasting events and find that, among ordinary people (nonexperts), “the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less.”

Wines at wine tastings are hardly a random selection. They should look at supermarket wines.

In my experience paying more (over £8) definitely increases the chance of getting a nice bottle, but it doesn't guarantee it. But that effect is only true up to maybe £15 at the most. Above that you're throwing money away.

Re: Is wine fake?

#106

Post by taneq »

p1necone wrote: post #26
gspencley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily. My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines. Part of the "problem" is that taste is…

The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.

Very true. I live in a wine region and an $8 bottle from the local booze shop can sometimes be found in restaurants on the other side of the world for $50+. Is not just that cheap wine is often as good as expensive wine, sometimes it’s exactly the same thing.

Re: Is wine fake?

#107

Post by bsder »

The Pepsi Challenge has LOTS of faults and isn't a great example.

I believe that one of the "debunkings" about the Pepsi Challenge was that people preferred the initial swig of Pepsi but preferred Coke if the question was asked after more consumption, after the beverage had warmed up, etc. Effectively, you could set up the situation to get people to choose one or the other quite easily.

Re: Is wine fake?

#108

Post by lvass »

p1necone wrote: post #26
gspencley wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a lot of blind wine tastings done and the results are always interesting. Sometimes cheap bottles score as high, or higher than vintages. Other times people can spot the cheap "carton" wine easily. My wife and I love to cook, have discussed opening our own restaurant, have eaten at lots of very expensive "haute cuisine" restaurants and have tasted lots of wines. Part of the "problem" is that taste is…

The secret is that a lot of cheap wine is pretty darn good. I imagine there's somewhat of a correlation between price and quality, especially at the absolute bottom end of the pricing scale. But it's a very loose correlation.

Absolutely true in South america. I've had a ton of different sub-$5 wines. In my experience, if you randomly buy 20 bottles of $5 wines, one is better than a $100 bottle, plus you also get some 5 great wines, 10 good ones and the rest works for cooking.

The best wine I've ever drank cost less than $3 and was produced in a tropical (21 South), 800m altitude region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Never assume wine is bad because it's cheap or from somewhere.

Re: Is wine fake?

#109

Post by metadat »

foobarian wrote: post #81
KineticLensman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Croatia many years ago, we ordered the cheapest bottle on the wine list. It was disgusting. The locals were amazed that we didn't know to water it down before drinking.

It's typical to drink watered down wine with routine/non-fancy/on-the-road meals. The locals call it 'gemišt' which is a germanism (gemischt = mixed). The wine used for this is bottom of the barrel, since it's a shame to waste good wine for this purpose.

Does the alcohol by volume content end up diluted proportionally to something like 2-7% vs the usual 12-14%?

Re: Is wine fake?

#110

Post by fleddr »

I simply consider it a type of harmless overconsumption, an expensive status-driven hobby not backed by rationalism.

It comes in many shapes and forms. Coffee snobs. People that buy a Rolex. Or have a 100K audio setup to match their supernatural hearing.

It doesn't have to make objective sense, as long as it makes sense in your head.

Post reply on HN